Speaking Korean I don’t know

I had a rather fun experience speaking Korean two days ago. I was mainly listening for a couple hours to a friend. I was tired and headachy so I’m not sure how good a listener I was but afterwards when I started to talk suddenly all the words and what I wanted to say flowed out very naturally and fluently. And the strange thing was I found myself using loads words and phrases that I really didn’t know on a cognitive level where I could give a dictionary definition or even know the English translation. But I knew them on an emotional level and knew they conveyed my meaning.

I kind of felt like I was watching my mouth speak without knowing exactly what I said or why suddenly my mouth was using all these words or sentence patterns. Then again at night in my dream I kept hearing myself continue to talk and talk in Korean.

I have had this experience before, but it felt rather more extreme than usual this time. I wonder though if this is eer how we often speak our first language — using words and phrases that we havent consciously learned or remembered and for which we often (when we think of it) can’t cognitively define. Nevertheless we eerily know what thoughts and emotion they convey.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

Listening to a language makes you learn unconsciously the phrases and structure of sentences. I think it’s part of humans’ instinctive intelligence. I encountered this in English, my second language, using phrases that I’m not really sure what they mean but I know they are used in this situation!

Therefore, listening to a language even without understanding a word helps in learning it. I listen to the Korean radio all the time. I still don’t know Korean, but I’m hoping that it will have an effect when I reach an advanced level, just like you did.